<p>Biology takes no skills whatsoever. Anyone with a good memory can do Biology. Stick Raymond from “Rainman” in a Biology class and he will get 100%'s on every single exam. All you need is a good memory and have the ability to consume information (not even understand it) and regurgitate it on exam days. </p>
<p>I’m sorry, but this is the sad fact. And this isn’t coming from a Chemistry major either. I’m not trying to knock on Biology majors or anything, in fact I’m a Biology major myself (however, I’m switching out this week because I can’t stand Biology). </p>
<p>There’s a bunch of kids (about 4-6) whom I have a number of classes with. On Chemistry and Calculus exams, they all do very poorly (around the the 40%-60% range), but in Biology – since it’s all memorization – they can at least stay afloat (70%-90% range). </p>
<p>When you actually need to apply the information you learned and actually work out problems that require reason and logic and sense, they fail; but when it’s just spitting back information – they excel. </p>
<p>I swear Biology isn’t even a test of how intelligent or how smart you are; it’s a test of how much you can remember and how much you can spit out on exam days.</p>
<p>Memorization is actually difficult. I am a biology major and would rather learn how to know how things work. And i actually excel in chemistry and the other applied sciences.That is much easier, IMHO.</p>
<p>I endorse this statement fully. Memorization is not a skill, it is something you are born with. Imagine giving a degree to someone for being 2 cm taller than average. That’s the equivalent of giving someone a biology degree. The “practice” of medicine in the US is even more of a joke. In no other country do existing doctors limit the number of new doctors. It is a cartel. Medical schools in the US do not accept people who are interested in medicine, they accept people who are good at applying to medical school. Cheating is rampant in all biological sciences departments. This also results in ridiculous wastes of money for research on rare chronic diseases that take billions of USD to try to find a cure for but affect like 1/100000 people, because everything drives up the cost of medicine and it’s that poor white kid that dies and everyone pities him. No one thinks, however, that chemical and civil engineering can save millions of Africans for a fraction of the cost of a single surgery but civil engineering research gets nowhere near life sciences level of funding. Guess its true what they say, everyone’s born equal, except the rich are more equal than others.</p>
<p>In short, all the biomedical sciences are a Ponzi scheme and similar to Latin American drug cartels. Especially in the US, where they’re parasites feeding off a government Ponzi scheme of its own. Biological Sciences BS degrees have the LOWEST AVERAGE SALARY amongst all BS degrees. Avoid them if you value your youth, your money, and your well being. Instead, pursue a career in Engineering, Finance or the Physical Sciences. It’ll be a better use of your time, you just need a BS, and the payoff is better in the long run, especially finance. Why waste 200K USD for a medical degree over 10 years when you can make millions as an investment banker with a BS in math? And if you’re not going to medical school with a BS in Biology you’re just going to end up as a lab drone doing PCR or Gel Elecrophoresis over and over again.</p>
<p>The best programs in any science or engineering discipline are never based on memorization. All of them (biology included) require keen analytical skill.</p>
<p>If your program IS based on memorization, you will not survive in the scientific/engineering job market.</p>
<p>■■■■■. This is a nonsensical post. Because you believe something, you state it is as fact. Your sample population is a group of 6 students in your school. No surprise you bailed on biology, you can’t objectively support a hypothesis with meaningful data. Follow your passion but don’t denigrate others for their interests.</p>
<p>To suggest that biology majors can’t do well in chemistry or calculus is just not true - maybe just in your small circle. I hire and work with scientists - biologists, chemists, and engineers - and have for many years. I know what they are capable of, and I see college transcripts all the time. Many of the biology majors I see have taken a good deal of chemistry and calculus/Diff Eq. and didn’t just get by - they did well. </p>
<p>If any science required only a good memory, there would be no advancement in that science - just a repetition of history. Clearly, the biological sciences have brought about new discoveries in fields from environmental remediation to medicine. Perhaps this is more apparent when you take upper level classes.</p>
<p>Don’t tell anyone that. By the time they’ve taken upper level classes, they’ve already wasted at least 3 years. And in the upper level classes I’ve taken, 4/5 were pure memorization. The other was still memorization heavy.</p>
<p>Advances in biological sciences are some of the least productive. Biotech is a typical high input, low output field whose applied research would barely survive without government funding. The amount of dependence on freely published research in journals is staggering, unlike other applied research which can be privately funded. In itself this is nothing bad, but it does show that for given input, the output for biological research is lower than for most other fields.</p>
<p>Think about this for a second: taking the argument to the extreme, even if we knew nothing about the molecular mechanism of any disease, but had the common sense to realize the statistical correlation between contaminated environments and death due to disease, civil engineers would be able to build sewers to transport wastewater, and chemical engineers would design treatment plants to sterilize it (more extreme, since we only know that living things cause disease, nothing about their mechanism), average lifespans would not fall very much! India has some of the best doctors in the world, yet due to poor sanitation they have a horrendous death rate due to disease. You really don’t need to know the detailed molecular mechanisms of diseases to increase human lifespan significantly. Medicine in the US is focused on treating exceptional, difficult, and chronic cases as they make major $$$; however, if ALL research in this aspect stopped, the average lifespan in the US would not drop significantly.</p>
<p>For me, going to medical school, where you mainly study Biology, was a difficult transition at first after getting my BS in Astronomy which was basically Physics and Math. As an Astronomy major I usually covered only a couple of pages a night in my relatively short textbooks. Little memorization was needed but strong analytic skills were crucial. The amount of new material that had to be learned was not great but it was material that is extremely difficult to understand. In medical school the textbooks were 2000 page tomes and it was not unusual to have to learn all the material in 50 pages in one night. There is very little in medical school that is particularly difficult to understand but there was just so much of it. </p>
<p>To survive I had to adjust my approach to learning to put much more effort into memorizing huge amounts of pretty straightforward information and less emphasis on understanding a limited number of difficult concepts.</p>
<p>Lemaitre: Just a question, no offense or anything, but why did you go to medical school instead of graduate study in engineering, physics or finance? They would all have led to lucrative careers in either industry or wall street making more money than medical doctors and using your mathematical skills.</p>
<p>@LastThreeYears Did you ever consider that maybe people go to medical school simply because they want to become doctors? Of course there are easier ways to make money, as well as ways just as hard to make crazy amounts of money.</p>
<p>No, I have never considered that people would go to medical school because they wanted to be a doctor and help people by being a doctor.</p>
<p>People wanted to go to medical school to become a doctor because of pay inflation due to the medical cartel situation in the US. I’ve seen plenty.</p>
<p>So my question is, if money is the only thing they care about, why medicine? There’s so many other ways to make more money than MDs (more output) with less debt and time (less input). Finance and management at a large technical company are some of them.</p>
<p>If someone is interested in helping others, a single civil or chemical engineer can save 50 times more lives than even the best surgeon.</p>
<p>Wait, why are people talking about medicine when the thread is about biology? Physicians aren’t biologists, any more than lawyers are political scientists/philosophers.</p>
<p>“No, I have never considered that people would go to medical school because they wanted to be a doctor and help people by being a doctor.
People wanted to go to medical school to become a doctor because of pay inflation due to the medical cartel situation in the US. I’ve seen plenty.”</p>
<p>Your demonstrations are all based on your own belief that “money is the only thing they care about”. You can’t assume everyone to be the same as people in your circle.</p>
<p>"If someone is interested in helping others, a single civil or chemical engineer can save 50 times more lives than even the best surgeon. "</p>
<p>If all surgeons endorse your opinion and switch into finance then go for money, fifty times more lives than the best chemical engineers can save will lose.</p>
<p>By the way, I have never considered that people who care about only money would be interested in helping others. And people who really want to help others and save lives do not consider the amount they can help or save.</p>
<p>Just because you are bad at something doesn’t mean that it takes “no skill”. Memorization is a skill and puerile minds that denigrate the sciences are what hold society back.</p>
<p>I honestly can’t believe that you are so disillusioned with biology. Although many can, and do, cheat and/ or memorize biology the true beauty is to understand the many different concepts which reside under the umbrella term “biology”. It is the study of life and true biologists have some of the most enjoyable jobs imaginable. We can learn about the living world around us on a micro or macro scale through biology. The courses may be term intensive but what would you suggest they be? Biology doesn’t involve the ridiculous number crunching that Physics or Chemistry majors go through. This is because it is about studying and <em>understanding</em> our world. It is what you make of it. And it is necessary to memorize the terms in biology just as it is necessary to memorize the formulas in chemistry or physics. They are simply different fields of study. Don’t attack an entire field of study simply because idiot teenagers and college students decide to cheat or cram for tests. That is their choice and they are only hurting themselves. As for “wasting” money on a biology degree, I agree that the biology major in and of itself is greatly overused. I plan on pursuing an M.D/ Ph.D program after my undergraduate education and I believe that I am going to major in Neuroscience/ Cognitive Science (Whatever your school may call it, if it offers it all) and if I don’t I will be majoring in Biochemistry. They both involve a much deeper understanding of biological systems and are in my opinion, more worthy of a biology enthusiasts time. I recognize that the schoolwork in biology has its flaws but those who are passionate in what they do and have the brains to succeed in all of their classes are what make the fields of science and medicine so exciting. We are on the brink of incredible discoveries with BCI (Brain Computer Interface), iPSC (Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells), and various gene therapies. None of these could be possible without biologists, chemists, and doctors. Rather than attacking one another, I think that we should appreciate the findings and merits of each field and work together for the betterment of all. There was no need for this unprovoked verbal attack on the field of biology. I hope you will take at least some of what I have said to heart.</p>
<p>do you realize how much money was invested into those technologies? Life goes on without them, but try living without fuel made by chemists and chemical engineers.</p>